Idle thoughts – Unstructured musings from Joel Dunn…

Continuing reflections on TV cord-cutting

Its been a week since I put up a TV antennae at the beach house and dropped the Time Warner Cable subscription back to Internet only. Faithful readers of this blog know that it’s now been 4 years (July 2011) since I put up an antennae on the Chapel Hill house and dropped Uverse. I used the same configuration at Emerald Isle as in Chapel Hill – a ChannelMaster 4228HD antennae and a ChannelMaster 7777 preamp. This has been a while in coming, but with TWC raising rates once again, it was time to jump. We’d been paying $105 for non-digital cable and standard 15×1 Internet. TWC said the new rate would be $130, and would require a digital converter on each set. Enough! Internet only is $45 plus tax, so say $50. That’s $80/mo, or nearly $1000/yr for basic cable. Do we watch that much? Nope.

In fairness, we do pay for multiple streaming services, but we can use those in Chapel Hill or EI. Since we were already paying for these, it’s moot. We subscribe to Netflix, HBO NOW (for Game of Thrones), SlingTV (for ESPN). These are about $45/mo. We have a TiVo in Chapel Hill for $15/mo, so that’s $60 total, but it’s flexible and portable.

Putting up the antennae/amp is about $200, plus cabling, which can be done for under $50. At $80 /mo savings, that’s a 3 month payback.

Technically it’s easy, and you can feed all the TVs in your house using the old splitter in the TWC box on your house. If you have only one TV, an internal antennae for $50 can work, but for several sets, you need to feed the distribution system.

For reception, at EI, I’m picking up stations 50-70 miles away with clarity. WITN, WNCT, WCTI, WUNK and others.